Ministry by G. W. Ware

It has frequently been referred to as indicating the service of the Lord Jesus Christ towards a poor sinner in his distress about his sins;

• and you will pardon me if I say that I do not think it is a picture of the Lord Jesus coming in for such an one to deliver him from the sense of the consequences of his guilt,

• but rather of the way in which He deals in grace with one who, having received the initial blessing of the Gospel, has set out to take up a position in connection with "the testimony of our Lord", but who has to be fitted for that position.

• At any rate, I propose that we should look at the story from this standpoint, and regard this man as one who has been up to Jerusalem for blessing, and is on his way down to a place of testimony in Jericho,
  • the city suggestive of this present world, the scene where everything is away from God, where the curse, is, where there is confusion as the result of the working of man's lawless will, and where everything is contrary to the mind and the will of God.

There are a vast number of people today – and wherever one goes one finds them – who through infinite grace know something of the value of the atoning death of the Lord Jesus in respect of their sins.

• They tell us that they have put their trust in His blood, and that they have nothing else that they are looking to, and that they have no other hope and no other expectation than that which comes to them on the ground of His finished work.

• All such I look upon as those who have been up to Jerusalem for blessing – and they have got this much at any rate. But to the newly-awakened soul, to the one who has been brought to rest on the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ, there very soon comes the desire to be for Him in this world.

• We do not think very much of anyone who says he is converted, but who has no exercise about being in the place of testimony here, but one sees that the one who sets out to take up such a position has to be fitted for it.

Now the first great lesson that the soul has to learn is that it has no power in itself to overcome the assaults of the enemy. It is set forth here in what happens to this man as he goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He is confronted with the full power of the enemy. The thieves come upon him.

• It is evident that the man put up the most tremendous fight against them. He fights against them so strenuously that when they have finished with their robbery of him they have wounded him and left him half dead. He is absolutely helpless by the roadside.

• That is not the picture of a man in alliance with the thieves. He is opposed to them, and he does not propose to give in to them. Many of us know something of an exercise like that.

• We have set forth from the place of blessing to do what is incumbent upon us – to take up a position in connection with the testimony here. On the way the enemy came upon us, but we set up a good fight. I do not think much of a man who has not fought with his lusts and passions.

• A man has certain bad habits from which he wants to break away, and he wants to be delivered from their thrall and power. Perhaps he has a very bad temper, and he feels it is unsuitable that he should be in a position of testimony until he has overcome it. So he fights against it, but it is too strong for him.

• Perhaps he has a habit of exaggeration, or a love of light literature. He fights against these, and he prays against them, and makes resolves against them, and perhaps even makes some solemn vows to God about them that he will never give into them again. But he does. So the man fights on.

• Is this where you are tonight, struggling with these things with all your might? 'I want to throw off their thrall', you say. 'They seem to have some tremendous power over me, but I am fighting it out'.

• All I can say is that I am very glad you are fighting. It shows you have faced Jericho. You are going down to the place of testimony, and you find there are these things opposing you which are unsuitable, but which are too strong for you.

• The man in the story at last comes to this Ó that the thieves have completely mastered him. They have reduced him to weakness, robbed him of his possessions, and stripped him of his raiment.

• So has it been in our case. The thieves robbed us of our joy, our happiness, and our assurance; but it is a great point gained when I come to the sense that I have lost my raiment as well, in other words, that I have lost my character. I have confessed the name of Christ, and have not been able to live up to it. I have lost everything.

• It is a wonderful moment when we find that by no efforts of our own can we overcome these tremendous powers arrayed against us to interfere with our being for Christ in the place of testimony down here.

At this point of the story, the priest and the Levite come in. People have been apt to speak about them disparagingly, but they are useful persons in their proper sphere and place. I think they just felt that the case was outside their province.

• Perhaps you have tried ordinances; that is what is indicated in the priest. The most terrible device on this line is that some even think that if they only could take the Lord's Supper, it would help them against their besetments.

• Or perhaps you have tried to reduce yourself to order by setting laws and commandments before you. This is the work of the Levite. He insists upon God's holy law and his commandments. You have accepted them as God's standard for you, but you have not been able to live up to it.

• So that neither ordinances nor the law can give any help to a man under such conditions as we have depicted here.

• If you find yourself similarly situated, feeling utterly helpless and hopeless, and that you are ruined in your moral constitution by the onslaughts of sin, you are brought, like this poor man, to the point where deliverance can be known.

The Spirit of God would compel us by all these workings with us to look outside ourselves for deliverance from the power of sin,

• and would bring us into an apprehension of how the blessed Lord Jesus has not only in His precious death taken up the question of our sins, but also the question of our whole state and condition in nature,

• so that we may be delivered from the power and domination of sin. That is what the blessed Lord proposes to do for everyone here who is in trouble as to thieves.

So we see that when the man is brought to this point, the Good Samaritan draws near to him to take up the question of the terrible condition in which he is found.

• The first thing is that He comes where he is. Let me try and comfort you with this. The Lord has taken account of you in your exercises, consequent upon your having faced the place of testimony.

• If it had been that your state of soul was such that you were content with having received blessing at Jerusalem, and were just content to wait until He takes you on high, you would miss all these exercises, but you would also miss the privileges of the present moment.

• If you were looking out only for a glorious and happy eternity, but had no exercise about your position in testimony; none of these things would appeal to you.

• May the Lord give to every one of us deep exercise as to the call addressed to us that we should definitely take up this position here for Him.

  The Good Samaritan drew near to this man. The Lord Jesus Christ is drawing near to you. He takes account of you in your trouble. He has not been unmindful of your exercises.

  • He has watched your overthrow at the hands of the enemy. He has taken account of the fact that at last the power of the enemy has got complete dominance over you, and that you are so discouraged about it that you are disposed to say you will give the whole thing up, and that Christianity is a failure from start to finish.

• He has taken account of all that has gone on, and waited until you were found in a suitable condition to appreciate the grace that He is so ready to administer.

• The first thing the Good Samaritan does is to bind up the wounds. I think when the Lord Jesus comes nigh to us, He would minister to our souls the sense that in His precious death He has not only taken up the whole question of what we have done, but also that of what we are in our state before God.

• He knew all about the absolute condition of weakness to which man had been reduced by sin. He took up that question when He went to the Cross. He entered into it all with God, and in His precious death He laid the righteous foundation on which not only the question of our sins might be settled
  • but on which also He might draw near to us in view of our deliverance from the domination of sin.

• We find in 1 Corinthians 15, that the Apostle indicates the four great staple facts of His Gospel, and the first is that "Christ died for our sins". That is the initial blessing of the Gospel to which we have already referred.

• We thank God for the Gospel, which tells us of a blessed living Christ in the presence of God who once died for our sins. Not what Jesus did at the cross merely, but that there is a blessed living Man in the presence of God, at this very moment adorning His throne, Who once took up the question of our sins at Calvary's cross and died for them. We love that story.

• Do we love equally the Gospel of His burial? The Gospel of the burial of Christ? You say, 'We have never heard the Gospel of His burial preached'. If we preach the Gospel of His death, we must also preach the Gospel of His burial.

• What are the glad tidings connected with His burial? I understand by it that the Spirit of God would seek to bring home to my soul this most marvellous fact, that Christ not only died for our sins on the cross,
  • but that in His wonderful grace He carried down into the tomb on our behalf, out of God's sight for ever, all that we are as children of Adam.

• Is not that good news for you? You have struggled and fought with sin. The glorious Gospel of the blessed God is that this chapter of your soul history has been closed in the death and burial of our Lord Jesus Christ.

• God is not expecting anything from you and me as after the flesh, for when Christ went down into the grave He closed forever before God that condition in which you and I had been so offensive to Him.

• This is a grand gospel to a man who has been struggling to make himself go right and finds he cannot:
  "Jesus died, and we died with Him,
  Buried in His grave we lay".

We have been "buried therefore with Him by baptism unto death".

• We have been "baptised to His death", Romans 6: 3-4;

  "Buried with Him in baptism", Colossians 2: 12.

• What a glorious termination to the struggling with the moral condition that is past mending! I beg you to pay attention to this, for it is a point of the very greatest possible moment.

• I know the difficulties that souls are in, and I want to show you how the Spirit of God desires by means of the experiences and exercises through which you are passing, to bring you to the point that God Himself has arrived at in relation to what you and I are as after the flesh.
  • The blessed God has declared in the death of Christ that there is no place for us before Him in the flesh.

• Have you come to the same conclusion? Are you still trying to put things right? Are you seeking by curbing the lusts and passions of the flesh to ameliorate a condition which God has judicially terminated in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ?

• Are you trying the Priest and the Levite in connection with it, trying to put yourself right by ordinances and commandments?

• If so, you are trying to put straight what the blessed God Himself has declared must be, and has been, removed from before Him in the death of Christ. What the Spirit of God would say to you tonight is, 'Submit to God's judgment about it'.

It is a moment of supreme importance when the believer finds that he can make no headway against the thieves, and gives up all his strugglings and looks outside himself for deliverance from their power.

• At last he has come to the sense of his entire weakness in the flesh, and that he has no power against that which has hitherto held him under its dominance.

• Then the Lord binds him up; that is, He brings home to the soul the sense that in His own precious death on the cross all that we are as after the order of sinful flesh came under the holy judgment of God, and we begin to appreciate, in a living way, the fact that when Jesus died we died with Him.

• We have commenced an entirely new appreciation of the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, and begin to see it now as in its application to our state before God, and not only as an atoning sacrifice in respect of our guilt.

• This is the dawn of an entirely new day to the troubled soul of the believer, and he is greatly relieved as he accepts this light of 'the Gospel of the burial',
  • knowing this that "our old man has been crucified with Him that the body of sin might be annulled that we should no longer serve" [i.e. be under the dominance of] "sin", Romans 6: 6.

• But let us beware of stopping there, as if we had reached finality, for there is yet much more into which our souls must enter. I have come across many who tell me 'I know that in the cross of our Lord Jesus our old man was crucified with Him'.

• They have come by faith into the light of what God has done with it, but now the question has to be raised not merely as to what God has done with it, but what you and I have done with it.

• Did you endorse the sentence? It is not only a question of what God has done; we get that in Romans 6. But when I come to Galatians 5: 24, I read,
  • "They that are of the Christ have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts".

• Have you started on that line? Have you in your soul the joy of the Gospel of the burial of Christ – the great joy that you have not got to trouble yourself about the amendment of that which after 4000 years of probation God has finally rejected as worthless?

The next thing is that with the binding up He poured in oil and wine.

• It is a fine moment when the soul receives the oil. These exercises which we have been considering, and which so many of the people of God go through, are all used by the Lord to the end that they may come to the point where they are ready to receive the oil; in other words, when God can give them His Spirit.

• You say, 'I received the Spirit when I was born again'. That is the very thing you did not do. No man ever received the Spirit when he was born again.

• His being born again was a direct action of the Spirit, but it is one thing for the Spirit to touch me in new birth, and awaken me to the sense of my condition before God,
  • and quite another thing that I should receive the Spirit in order that my soul should apprehend the power that is at my disposal in a risen Christ.

• When the believer has come to the point when he looks outside himself after the combat with self is over, and takes in the marvellous fact that there is a blessed Man in the presence of God in whom is all power, he has received the Spirit.

• Have you received the Spirit? Is it any wonder that we are weak when we have not received the Spirit?

• Everything was true for me in purpose when God touched me in new birth. He touched me in view of all that was in His heart for me. All that he had enfolded in Christ was mine in purpose directly the Spirit of God wrought with me in new birth, but
  • God has given His Spirit to the end that everything which He has enfolded in Christ might be unfolded to me and made good in me in the power of that Spirit. All power has been enfolded in Christ.

• Here is a man that has been reduced by the thieves to this point – wounded, naked, half dead, Priest and Levite no good to him.

• Now the blessed Lord Jesus draws near to one in such conditions, and not only binds him up, but gives him His Holy Spirit, establishing a conscious link between the soul and Himself,
  • to the end that the power that is in Him might work livingly in the believer here, and that he might be empowered for conflict.

• It is a wonderful movement when we begin to look to the right place where the power is, when we give up looking at ourselves or our own ideas and find that all the power is in the hand of that blessed living Man in glory, and that He gives us His Spirit to the end that all that He is may be available to us.

• Have you been through this two-fold exercise – first about your sins and then about yourself? The end of it is that you turn to Christ and appreciate Him as Saviour in an entirely new way. What grand news for a man who wants to be in the place of true testimony for Christ!

• There is power in Christ to support him in spite of all the opposition of the enemy, and he need never have another overthrow from the thieves. He is going to be victorious over them in the power that indwells a blessed living Christ. Is it good news for you tonight?

• Do you like to hear that there is power in the blessed Man up there and that the Spirit has been given to you so that the power that is in Him up there in the heavens might be available to you here in this world, that you may know down here the support of the very self-same power that Christ was in as a blessed Man when He was here?

• People have got somehow or other the idea that Christ obviated the difficulties of His pathway here as Man by the power of His Godhead – He was God over all, blessed for evermore – and that He had a power whereby He moved along down: here, other than that put at our disposal.

• The marvellous thing about the manhood of the blessed Saviour is that He came down here and took up the condition of weakness and dependence on God in such a real way that He could say, "Preserve me, O God, for in Thee do I put my trust".

• The very selfsame spirit He had when He was down here in this world, and in the power of which He "went about doing good", is now to be communicated to you and me, in order that we may be empowered for testimony here in this world. That is grand news!

• I look up to Christ where He is, and I receive His Spirit, and I am in touch with the Source: of "all power". The practical outcome of this is that we shall walk even as He walked.

• What a consummation! What an issue to the exercise! How blessed of the Lord to pass us through an exercise that brings us to the point where we find in Him the positive source of all the power that we want for every detail of our pathway in connection with the will of God here.

• Some think that all you need to do is to have your time of prayer and reading, and study the Scriptures well for an hour or so; read a bit, and then pray a bit, and then you will get through the day without further difficulty. No you won't! You will break down before breakfast is over! The Lord will never allow it, because that makes us independent of Himself.

As with the tramway systems in this and other great cities, so with ourselves, an overhead power is introduced. There has to be an acceptance in the soul of the pathway of Christ here, and then the Spirit will maintain the believer in touch with the power overhead, so that he may be sustained every moment of the day.

• In the case of an electric car in some colder latitudes there are three things dependent on the trolley-wheel, viz. (1) the movement of the car, (2) its light, and (3) its warmth – for they carry electric heaters. The power is in the wire, but it does not come into the tram unless the trolley-wheel is on the line.

• If in the power of communion and of an ungrieved Spirit my trolley-wheel is held against the wire and I find that I have power for movement, power for testimony, and the enjoyment of the warmth of the love of God, there will be one constant stream of power coming down to me in all the circumstances in which I am found down here in this world in connection with the pathway of the will of God.

• No man comes out in practical Christianity until these questions are settled. The blessed, glorified Man Who has all power in His hands gives it to His people as and when they need it, so that they may not break down in their pathway.

• Wonderful provision has been made for us in case we should fail. We have an Advocate with the Father, so that, if by some piece of folly we break down, and the trolley-wheel gets off the wire, He restores the communications.

• I have thus found a settlement of every question that could possibly be raised in connection with my position down here in this world. My sins, and my state, and everything else, have their solution in the risen Christ in Whom there is "all power".

The time is gone, and we must leave the rest of the story for another occasion. May God grant that everyone of our souls may lay hold on what is enfolded in Christ, so that we are no longer afraid of the thieves, our wounds are bound up, the oil is poured in, and we are in touch with all the resources found in the Christ of God.

In that way he is a picture of the condition to which one who is truly a believer in Jesus is brought, through the assaults of sin.

• The believer has to come to the point where, through perhaps the most painful experience, he frankly acknowledges that he has no power of his own whereby to make a stand against the forces of evil, but that they overcome him and brought him to the discovery of his condition of complete weakness.

• When the soul reaches that point, then the blessed Lord Jesus Christ draws near to it in a new way altogether; not now to speak to it about the forgiveness of sins,
  • but to bring home to it the wonderful fact that there is a new source of power altogether, and that instead of there being any capability in man in his own strength to face the power of the enemy,

• he has to be brought to such a sense of his own utter weakness that he gladly looks outside himself for a source of power, and finds it in the blessed Christ of God Himself.

All that we were engaged with last week. We saw that the Lord Jesus, in all the rich and blessed grace of His heart, delights to draw near to the one that has come, through the most painful experience, to the sense of his own utter weakness.

• He comes in with bandage; that is, to give to him the sense that he has no longer to be found contending against these forces of sin, but that the whole state and condition in which he was found after the flesh, has been taken up by the Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross, and finally and completely ended for God.

• Wonderful comfort this to the soul, when it comes to the fact that it has no longer to seek to bring about an amelioration of a condition which is perfectly hopeless, but when it sees that the condition which it cannot ameliorate has been terminated for God in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

• This is a supreme moment in the history of the believer, when he looks outside himself, to find in a blessed Man, who by His death has terminated the whole condition in which he is found as a child of Adam here, the source of a new power altogether.

We saw, towards the end of our meeting, that Christ presents Himself as the One in Whom there is treasured up all the power that His people need for their conduct in the pathway of the will of God down here.

• I think one great reason why people are missing this great blessing at the present moment, is this, that they have failed to see that all the power of God, and all the support of our Lord Jesus Christ, and all the comfort of the Holy Ghost, only flow in one channel here in this world, and that is the channel or the pathway which has been marked by the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ.

• In no other pathway can the power be experienced. If the soul is not set for the pathway that Christ has marked out, it will never prove what is the power that is in Him to maintain it here according to the will of God.

I used the illustration last week of the tram. I would like to say further that if the tram is to be in the good of the power that is overhead, it must be on the marked-out tram-line. If the tram gets off the pathway, it cannot experience the good of the power that is overhead.

• One would like to set it before every one of our souls that the pathway has been marked by the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ here in this world, and outside that pathway there is neither power, comfort, support nor solace for the people of God.

• Why? Because all this is ministered to us, as we were saying, by our Lord Jesus Christ. There is only one pathway He knows anything about –
  “There is but that one in this waste
  Which His footsteps have marked as His own”.

• In that way all this solace and support and comfort flow. Outside it, they do not flow at all.

I find a great many who complain that they do not prove the power and the support which they hear spoken of and the reason of it is that

• they have been seeking to walk in a pathway of their own choosing,

• and in that pathway they cannot experience the good of the support that is treasured up for them in Christ.

• He knows nothing of such pathways. He cannot sympathise with us in such pathways, or succour us. He will sympathise with us, succour and support us, and give us power, in the pathway of God’s will here in this world, but He will give it nowhere else.

• Would we seek that He should give it to us anywhere else? The pathway that Christ marked by his feet in this world is the only pathway in which we can prove the good of all that He is as an all-sufficient Saviour for us along every bit of the road.

• One would like to put it to the very youngest soul, have you addressed yourself to that pathway?

• If you have, it has brought you into very deep exercise, but the issue of the exercise is that you are brought to the discovery on the one hand of your own weakness, but, on the other, that there is in the Lord Jesus Christ all that is needful for you in the pathway of the will of God.

It is at this point in our spiritual history that we receive the Spirit, and we become conscious of a new link between our souls and Christ, and begin to prove in a very new way what Christ can be for us as a people down here in this world.

• I would like to ask you, have you the conscious sense of a definite link in your soul with Christ, so that by the Spirit all the power there is in Him as a blessed Man in Glory, may be administered to you as you pursue the pathway of the will of God down here? The Spirit of God is given to that end, among others.

• If it were not for the Spirit of God, there would be a complete gap between the people of God on earth and the blessed Lord Jesus Christ in heaven.

• Whatever there might be in Him in heaven would be for the pleasure of God, but it would not be effectual in the people of God on earth. The Spirit is given that everything that is enfolded in Christ might be freely administered to us.

Turn away your ears from everybody who tells you that you received the Spirit when you were born again. Nobody received the Spirit when he was born again.

• You were born again in view of your receiving the Spirit. There comes a moment when God gives us His Holy Spirit.

• It should cause the deepest exercise with us, and cause much turning of our hearts to God, that we may have the assurance in our souls that we have received the Spirit, and with Him the conscious sense of a definite link with Christ.

It may be just the beginning of things here. I think in this chapter we get the initial step in this line. The wounds are bound up, and the oil is poured in.

• In the pouring in of the oil there is indicated, as we have been saying, the presence of the Spirit, linking the soul with Christ.

• By the wine is indicated the new order of things connected with Christ in resurrection, and as the believer who has received the Spirit apprehends his links with that order, and takes account of himself as in Christ, the joys of the new creation begin to affect his soul. He has received “oil and wine”.

• I think the binding up has effected two things;
  1. it has put the soul in link with Christ, as the source of all power,

  2. and it has given it a sense of association with Him, according to the purpose of God, in a condition of things that will never be tarnished by the inroad of sin, but where everything will be according to the good pleasure of God for ever.

• What a change has come to pass in the soul when it realises, that in Christ there is all power for the whole of its condition here in this world, and that when these conditions are ended there is a scene, on which indeed the gaze of the soul is fixed, where everything is according to the thoughts and mind of the blessed God for ever.

• It puts things on a totally different footing for us. We see everything in a totally new light, and instead of having the objects of our souls in a scene shadowed by death, we find our joy in a scene of life that never knows a shadow.

• Have we begun to breathe such an atmosphere as this? Do we know what it is to be linked up with this blessed Man in the glory of God – not only finding in Him the source of a competent power over every difficulty on the way through which we pass,
  • but also having our souls filled with the joy of belonging to a condition of things where there will be nothing to disturb our rest or God’s rest for ever?

• A new condition of things has indeed begun to dawn upon the soul!

The next thing I find is that the Good Samaritan puts this man upon His own beast, and brings him to the inn.